WikiLeaks and the Massive Data Dump That Rocked the Pentagon

In late 2009, a young Army intelligence analyst at a military base near Baghdad surveyed the vast, classified databases at his fingertips and decided that America was keeping too many secrets. As a child of the Internet age, Bradley Manning knew what to do. The 22-year-old reached out anonymously to WikiLeaks.org, the secret-spilling website that had been established three years earlier by Australian cypherpunk Julian Assange.

WikiLeaks had an uneven track record: It released important files but also drivel, like family photos hacked from Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account. Manning changed that, making Assange famous with a classified video, which WikiLeaks dubbed “Collateral Murder,” showing a 2007 Army Apache helicopter attack that killed civilians and wounded children. But it was the subsequent database leaks that fundamentally changed whistle-blowing. A tranche of nearly 500,000 Army field reports from Afghanistan and Iraq showed war in a whole new way: as structured data, with geotags, time stamps, and casualty counts. A database of 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables weighed in at 1.6 gigabytes—90 times the size of the Pentagon Papers—and exposed diplomatic secrets from 274 embassies and outposts around the world.

Manning is now in a US jail awaiting court-martial in June, and Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, avoiding a sex crime investigation in Sweden. WikiLeaks is back to hosting hacked emails. But no matter its fate, it launched the age of the megaleak.